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New day.. New office location.. New Seat..
So many new things happened to me before this new year comes.
Newness always brings enthusiasm and excitement.
Hope this New Year also comes with hand full of surprises as Every Day is a New Day indeed..!!!

When: 31 BC
Where: Rome and Egypt
What’s So Special about Their Love: These two had a love so strong, war was waged against them to break them up. When Mark Antony left his wife, Octavia, for the mesmerizing Cleopatra, Octavia’s brother Octavian brought the army of Rome to destroy them. These two lovers were so entranced with each other that they committed suicide rather than be apart- the ultimate Romeo and Juliet true love story.

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

I have
tried to keep this brief, but with the best part of 2,500 stories to
summarise, we apologise if our version of brief doesn't quite tally with the
accepted one. But if our roundup helps you get a feel for what's been going
on over the past 12 months, in return for just 10minutes or so of your time, we hope you'll
forgive us...

January

The first
month of 2011 was dominated by Apple, with two pieces of good news, and one
bad. The first positive note was the announcement of record first quarter net
profits of $6bn (£3.9bn), up from the previous quarter’s $4.31bn.

Apple was
also celebrating the 10 billionth app download from the App Store. The magic
number was achieved when Gail Davis of Orpington, Kent in the UK downloaded
Paper Glider, and walked away with a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card for her
trouble. But on a more sombre note, the company also revealed that CEO Steve
Jobs was taking medical leave from the company to concentrate on his health –
a sad precursor to what would happen later in the year.

Away from
Apple, there were a couple of standout stats, as eBay revealed that it had
clocked up almost $2bn of mobile sales in 2010, up from just $600m in 2009,
and FutureSource Consulting released a report revealing that mobile web
traffic had doubled during 2010.

February
was all about acquisitions, as Synchronica bought Neustar’s Instant Messaging
(IM) business for $251,000; mobile app development firm Antenna Software
snapped up mobile internet software company Volantis Systems; SurfKitchen was
acquired by Teleca; and Mobile Interactive Group (MIG) took control of
technology, marketing and services company Golden Bytes International,
together with its operations in the Netherlands and Belgium.

While not
quite an acquisition - yet - the other big news was Nokia’s announcement that
it was entering into a strategic partnership with Microsoft, plus the
associated restructuring. The jury is still out on how that will end up,
though later the same month in his keynote address at Mobile World Congress,
Google CEO Eric Schmidt admitted to the company’s disappointment that Nokia
had opted for Windows Phone 7 over Android, telling delegates: “We would have
loved that they had chosen Android, but they chose the other guys. We would
like them to choose Android at some point in the future, and the offer
remains open. We think Android would have been a good choice for Nokia, and
we did try."

Elsewhere,
Google lost the services of AdMob’s first employee Russell Buckley, who
seemingly found the big corporate culture, even in a place as funky as
Google, not to his liking. He couldn’t stay out of things long, however,
fetching up at mobile couponing firm Eagle Eye Solutions just a few weeks
after leaving Google.

March

Apple and
Google were both in the news in March, Apple launching the iPad 2, and Google
admitting that some 260,000 Android phones had been hacked by dodgy apps.
There were lots of impressive stats flying round. A report from Berg Insight
revealed that smartphone shipments had risen by 74 per cent in 2010, while
another, this time from research 2guidance, revealed that paid apps had
generated £280m in the UK during the same year.

Meanwhile,
O2 Media announced that its O2 More opt-in advertising service had signed up
2m O2 customers, while the annual IAB/PwC study of the UK mobile advertising
market revealed that mobile ad spend in the UK had more than doubled in the
past 12 months, rising by 116 per cent.

In other
news, the Swedish Post Office announced plans for an SMS-based service, in
which customers would text in for a unique code, which they would then write
on the letter as proof of payment of postage. And the London Organising
Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) denied reports in the Independent
newspaper in the UK suggesting that mobile phones could be among a list of
items banned from events at the London 2012 Olympics, even going so far as go
confirm to Mobile Marketing that spectators would be allowed to take still
images and video footage of events on their phones.

April

Staying
with the Olympics, a report in the Daily Telegraph claimed there would be no
mobile coverage on the London Underground in time for the 2012 Olympics,
saying that the UK’s four mobile operators had shelved the scheme because it
was impossible to get it ready in time, despite the fact that Chinese
telecoms giant Huwaei had offered to provide up to £50m worth of technology
as a gift from one Olympic nation to another, representing one third of the
estimated £150m cost of the project.

NFC was in
the news, with a report from Forrester Research concluding that mass adoption
of NFC mobile payments was years away, and another from Juniper Research
forecasting that one in five mobile phones would be NFC-enabled by 2014.

A study
commissioned by Upstream, and conducted by YouGov, concluded that carriers
risk large-scale churn if they overcook their attempts to chase third-party
advertising income through opt-in ad programs. Undeterred, Orange UK
appointed Blyk to run the media sales program for its Orange Shots opt-in
service.

Another
month, another avalanche of upwardly mobile stats. In the UK, newspaper
publisher Mail Online announced that mobile traffic to its website had risen
from 3 per cent to 11 per cent of the total over the past 12 months, while a
study from mobile ad network Hunt Mobile Ads identified a year-on-year
increase in mobile traffic of 156 per cent in Latin America. And a quarterly
report produced by Google and the British Retail Consortium revealed that
traffic generated by mobile search for retail products had grown by 181 per
cent year-on-year between Q1 2010 and Q1 2011. Also on the stats front,
Facebook announced that it had clocked up 250m mobile users, and finally, UK
budget hotel chain Premier Inn revealed that its mobile app had generated
revenues of over £1m in just three months since launching in January 2011.

Two other
bits of business: Buongiorno bought mobile content and entertainment firm
Dada.net for €28.5m (£25m), and Nokia confirmed that it was handing over
software development for its Symbian platform to Accenture, along with plans
to reduce its global workforce by around 4,000 employees by the end of 2012.
Ouch.

May

In May, it
was all about money, as a study from Simon-Kucher & Partners revealed
that 76 per cent of 'Generation Y' consumers (18-26 year olds) would be
willing to use mobile banking services, and considered a monthly fee of £5 a
fair price to pay. Meanwhile, data from comScore’s MobiLens service found
that the number of European smartphone users engaged in mobile banking had
risen by 40 per cent since August 2010.

Still on
the subject of money, Orange and Barclaycard launched their Quick Tap,
NFC-based, contactless mobile payments services in the UK, though they have
been pretty quiet about it since. In the US, Google announced the summer
launch of its Google Wallet NFC mobile payments app. And mobile ad network
InMobi made its move into the mobile payments space with the launch of its
SmartPay, performance-based global, mobile payments solution.

All of
which made sense in the light of research from eDigitalResearch and eBusiness
consultancy Portaltech that revealed that half of all smartphone users use
their device to shop. This was a stat that Domino’s Pizza would definitely
concur with, as it announced that it had clocked up sales of over £10m
through its mobile channels in just eight months. And further credence was
given to the concept of mobile payments with the news that Comic Relief 2011
had raised £15.2m via £1, £5 and £10 text donations, representing more than
20 per cent of the overall £74.3 m raised at the time the announcement was
made.

Finally,
staying with the money theme, Microsoft announced that it was buying Skype
for $8.5bn.

June

Nokia was
back in the news in June, as CEO Stephen Elop revealed that the company chose
to partner with Microsoft because it didn't want to "give in" to
the surge towards Android. Later the same month, Nokia offloaded its Operator
Branded Messaging (OBM) business, which provides white-label mobile email and
Instant Messaging (IM) services to operators in N. America, to Synchronica.
Meanwhile, BlackBerry-maker RIM had its own problems to worry about, as it
missed its first quarter profit target, and announced job cuts. On a brighter
note, almost inevitably, Apple unveiled the latest version of its mobile
Operating System, iOS5, to the usual fanfare.

mCommerce
was also in the news, as the UK’s main mobile operators – with the notable
exception of 3 - announced plans to create a standalone mCommerce joint
venture to enable the rapid development and delivery of new mobile marketing
and payment services.

Staying
with mCommerce, Pizza Express said it would offer free wi-fi in all of its
384 UK restaurants, then soon afterwards, launched an iPhone app that enables
diners to pay for their meal through the app, at any point during the meal.
Meanwhile, mCommerce trailblazer Marks & Spencer revealed that it had
taken a £5,156 order for kitchen units on its mobile site, trumping the
previous largest mobile order of £3,280, for two sofas. And Google unveiled
its attempt to mobilise the long tail, with the launch of Google Sites Mobile
Landing Pages (aka Mobilize), which helps small and medium-sized businesses
to create a mobile landing page in a few easy steps.

July

The good
news continued into July, as Betfair reported that it had taken £1bn in bets
via the mobile channel in its last financial year. Apple celebrated the 15
billionth download from the App Store, so two and a half years for the first
10bn, six months for the next 5bn… The company also did its usual trick of
recording record third quarter profits, of $7.31bn.

The
analyst, Chetan Sharma, forecast mobile revenues of $1.3 trillion for 2011,
with data making up 24 per cent of the total, while comScore revealed that 42
per cent of UK consumers were using a smartphone, compared to 27 per cent a
year earlier.

But amidst
the good news, a couple of notes of caution too, both from the analyst,
YouGov, which released two reports. The first concluded that, in fact, UK
smartphone ownership was stalling, with 35 per cent of adults using a
smartphone, only a small increase on the 33 per cent recorded in the previous
quarter. The second revealed that these smartphone owners find mobile
advertising, for the most part, intrusive, and tend to ignore it. 79 per cent
of respondents said they thought mobile ads are intrusive. 88 per cent of
respondents said they ignore ads in applications, while 86 per cent ignore
them on the mobile web. Both studies were based on responses from 2,082
smartphone owners from YouGov's quarterly Smartphone, Mobile Internet,
eXperience tracker (SMIX).

The extent
of the problems at RIM were also revealed, as it confirmed that it would be
shedding 2,000 jobs, or 10 per cent of its workforce. On a more positive
note, Tesco followed Pizza Express’ lead in offering free wi-fi in its
stores, though on a more pilot-like basis, trialling the idea in four stores
initially. And mobile Demand Side Platform StrikeAd teamed up with Admeld,
which helps online publishers sell ad inventory, to bring Real Time Bidding
to the UK’s mobile advertising market.

Two deals
of note: self-styled personal media company Tigerspike secured an $11m
investment from Aegis Media, and eBay splashed $240m on the purchase of Zong,
which provides payments through mobile carrier billing.

August

August,
month of sunshine, where everyone downs tools and heads for the beach. Not a
bit of it. The action hardly let up. Leading the way was a bevy of big
brands, all turning to mobile in different ways. In Denmark, Nestle turned to
QR codes for a campaign for its Hjem-IS ice cream brand. In the UK, Kellogg's
launched a mobile game for its Krave chocolate cereal brand. Cadbury turned
to Augmented Reality, asking consumers to download the Blippar AR app to
their phone in order to bring the packaging on several of its chocolate bars
to life, converting the pack into a game. And Topshop got into the
gamification thing, with a SCVNGR campaign that offered customers rewards for
completing tasks such as such as snapping a photo of their favourite ‘back to
college’ outfit at Topshop, or telling SCVNGR which item they thought most
personifies the brand.

Staying
with the High Street, there was some good news for RIM finally, as it emerged
that scores of shoppers had been using their BlackBerrys to help each other
find the best bargains over the summer. Unfortunately, the “shoppers” in
question were looters, and RIM promised to help the UK police any way it
could to bring them to justice.

And staying
with the legal theme, Apple scored a major victory when it succeeded in
delaying sales of the Samsung Galaxy Tab tablet computer, while patent
disputes relating to Galaxy features Apple alleged were copied from the iPad
were resolved. Apple was granted a preliminary injunction from a court in
Dusseldorf which banned Samsung from selling its tablet in every EU member
nation except the Netherlands. Apple had already obtained a similar
injunction in Australia.

Later in
the month, Apple would find itself on the receiving end of a lawsuit, as
Openwave Systems filed legal complaints against Apple and RIM, in order to
protect its intellectual property on how mobile devices connect to the
internet. And there was more bad news for Apple, as Steve Jobs resigned as
the company’s CEO, owing to his health problems.

So where
was the good news? It was in the stats of course. UK regulator Ofcom released
a study confirming, in case anyone was in any doubt, that the UK was becoming
“addicted to smartphones”. And mobile ad network Mojiva released the results
of its Mobile Audience Guide (MAG) EMEA, a three-month study into the mobile
phone usage and mobile advertising habits of UK mobile users. The study found
that almost 60 per cent of respondents were spending 60 per cent of their
online time on mobile devices, creating a growing interest in mobile
advertising, with 58 per cent clicking on an ad at least once a week.

The
findings were confirmed by another ad network, Millennial Media, whose August
SMART Report found that six verticals - Finance, Retail & Restaurants,
Pharmaceuticals, Automotive, Entertainment, and Travel - had experienced
triple-digit year-on-year growth in terms of their mobile ad spend. They will
have been encouraged, no doubt, by the findings of another study, this time
from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and John Lewis, that revealed that
mobile advertising increases unprompted brand awareness from 3 per cent to 24
per cent.

In the US,
Android continued on its upward trajectory, securing a 41.8 per cent share of
the smartphone market in the latest results from comScore’s mobiLens study,
and Google looked to build on this position of strength with the acquisition
of Motorola’s smartphone business, attracted primarily by its patent
portfolio. There was one other acquisition of note, as mobile ad network
InMobi bought rich media creative agency, Sprout.

September

And so to
September, when mCommerce hit the headlines again, as fashion retailer New
Look reported a 500 per cent year-on-year increase in sales through its
mobile site. The figures backed the results of a study from the IAB that
found that the average transaction value on mobile had increased by 43 per
cent during 2011, to £17.49. A couple of days after that stat was released,
however, the IAB also revealed, less encouragingly, that the proportion of UK
mobile users that had engaged in mCommerce activity had risen by only 1 per
cent, from 51 per cent to 52 per cent, between 2010 and 2011.

But there’s
more to mCommerce than sitting at home on the sofa, of course, and September
offered, perhaps, a glimpse into the future of in-store retailing, as Global
Bay secured a 300-store iPad kiosk deployment from US retail chain, Pacific
Sunwear, while in the UK, Debenhams announced its own in-store kiosk
deployment.

NFC was
also back in the news. In Australia, JCDecaux and Tapit signed a two-year
agreement that will see the companies create Australia’s first dedicated NFC
Out of Home (OOH) advertising network. And in the US, Google went live with
its Google Wallet service, enabling owners of Sprint Nexus S 4G phones to pay
for goods and services using a Citi MasterCard credit card, or a Google
Prepaid Card, which can be funded with any of the user’s existing credit
cards. Don’t hold your breath on those user numbers though – research
conducted by Mobile Marketing among 2,000 US and 2,000 UK consumers found
that 72 per cent of US respondents had never heard of Google Wallet. In the
UK, the figure was 76 per cent…

There were
three deals worthy of note. InMobi enjoyed a good day at the office, securing
a $200m investment from Japanese internet firm, SoftBank. Mobile marketing
firm Velti spent $19m of the cash it raised from its IPO to acquire Air2Web,
which provides mobile CRM (mCRM) solutions in the US and India. And
IMImobile, which provides technology infrastructure for mobile data, voice
and video services to mobile operators, enterprises and media companies,
snapped up UK-based digital agency, Skinkers.

Meanwhile,
one Dougal Templeton secured what looked, on paper, like the dream job to end
all dream jobs, as he was appointed as Vouchercloud’s first director of
Christmas, though on second thoughts, it sounds like a job that comes with a
certain amount of pressure. Still, his inbox should be pretty quiet for the
next few months, you would imagine.

October

October saw
the passing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, at the age of 56, as he finally
succumbed to the pancreatic cancer that had first hit him seven years
earlier. Colleagues and competitors alike queued up to offer their tributes
to a man who seemed to revolutionise almost everything he touched. Rest in
Peace, Steve.

This was
also the month in which Apple defied expectations in a couple of ways,
Firstly, for once, it disappointedanalysts, posting Q4 revenue and profit figures that were down on the
previous quarter. Apple put the figures down to customers holding off buying
iPhones in September, in anticipation of the launch of its new handset. This
was the second surprise from Apple, as it failed to launch the much-rumoured
iPhone 5, instead unveiling an update to the existing iPhone 4, the iPhone
4S. No matter - despite the disappointment of iFans the world over, Apple
still sold 4m of its new handsets in the first three days.

What would
Nokia give for sales figures like that as it unveiled the first fruits of its
shotgun wedding to Microsoft, the Lumia 800 and 710 Windows Phone 7 handsets?
Initial sales figures suggest the honeymoon period is definitely over.

Still, if
anyone at Nokia is feeling a little down, they can always cheer themselves up
by looking over at RIM. BlackBerry users suffered a three-day outage in
October, and RIM offered a seminal lesson in how not to handle such a crisis,
fuelling the ire of its already angry customers. A study carried out by
YouGov found that the outage had a severe negative effect on consumers
perception of the brand, and on their propensity to buy a BlackBerry, with
RIM’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) falling from +15 to -6. As we may have said
earlier in this piece, ouch.

There was
all sorts of cheer elsewhere, however, as a study from IBM concluded that
mobile traffic as a percentage of all retail site visits would hit double
figures by Christmas, having grown from just over 4 per cent to 7.2 per cent
between November 2010 and May 2011. More stats, this time from the
Interactive Media in Retail Group (IMRG) revealed that the average percentage
of sales on retail websites attributable to mobile devices had risen from 0.4
per cent at the start of 2010, to 3.3 per cent in Q2 (May - July) 2011.

Looking
forwards, rather than backwards, eBay upped its forecast for the amount of
revenue it would generate through its mobile channels in 2011, from $4bn to
$5bn, revealing at the same time that sales through mobile now accounted for
more than 10 per cent of all purchases on eBay UK, and that globally, an item
is sold via eBay’s global mobile platforms every second. Domino’s Pizza
chipped in with some good news of its own, revealing that it had taken
£130,000 of mobile orders in a single day, Saturday 8 October - a major
contribution to over £1m of total online sales taken that day.

There was
one big deal to report, as Sony bought out Ericsson’s 50 per cent stake in
the companies’ Sony Ericsson handset business for €1.05bn in cash.

November

November
was a special month for us, as we celebrated our sixth birthday. If you’re
interested to see what our first ever post looked like, you can check it out
here. It was also the month in which we unveiled the winners in our 2011
Effective Mobile Marketing Awards program. Pepsi, Debenhams, Sainsbury’s, New
Look and Sky were among the brands taking the honours.

Elsewhere,
eBay hit the headlines, first submitting a 'Mobile Manifesto' to the UK
Government, setting out what the industry and policymakers must do to support
the country’s growing digital communications economy. Then it announced that
it was opening a ‘pop-up shop' for five days in London at the beginning of
December, the twist being that everything on sale would be bought via your
phone, or some in-store iPads. Let’s hope visitors to the store were actually
buying from eBay. A report from eDigitalResearch and IMRG found that a
quarter of UK consumers have accessed the internet on their smartphone while
out shopping, with 62 per cent of these admitting that they have accessed a
mobile retail site whilst in the store of another retailer.

eBay-owned
PayPal released a report that concluded that 2016 will be the year when UK
shoppers will be able to use their mobile phones to pay for things on the
high street with digital money rather than cash, cheques or cards. In
preparation for this day, Telefónica Digital and RIM launched a pilot program
of their Telefónica Wallet for BlackBerry service in Spain. Those taking part
in the trial can make payments by simply tapping their NFC-enabled BlackBerry
phone against a reader.

O2 launched
a trial 4G LTE (long-term evolution) network in London. The network will run
until July 2012, and will cover 40 square kilometres, from Hyde Park to the
O2 Arena Greenwich, with key areas, including Canary Wharf, Soho,
Westminster, the South Bank, and Kings Cross covered.

Elsewhere,
Adobe called time on Flash for mobiles, declaring in a blog post that HTML5
is now “the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser
across mobile platforms”. And Buongiorno teamed up with private equity firm
Francisco Partners to rebrand its b2b services, aimed at operators, brands,
and manufacturers, as Lumata.

There were
a couple of big deals, with Velti splashing more cash to buy Mobile
Interactive Group for a minimum $25m, rising to a possible $59m if earn-out
targets are achieved. Electronic payment solutions firm VeriFone Systems
acquired Global Bay Mobile Technologies, which provides iPad kiosks and other
mobile solutions for retailers. And Japanese internet firm Rakuten bought
eReading firm Kobo for $315m.

The year
started with Apple celebrating the 10 billionth download from the App Store,
so it was perhaps appropriate that it should end with Google hitting exactly
the same milestone with Android Market. Android also moved a step closer to
securing a 50 per cent share of the US smartphone market, notching up a 46.9
per cent share for the 3-month period to the end of November, in the latest
data from comScore’s mobiLens tracking service.

FMCG/CPG
giant Procter & Gamble revealed that it is working with tech firm mobeam
to create a mobile couponing system that makes electronic coupons presented
on a mobile device readable by the laser scanners used at the checkout,
without any additional POS equipment. And Domino’s Pizza continued on its
mobile journey, with a 6-sheet Augmented Reality poster campaign to promote
its latest pizza deals.

There was
encouragement for NFC, as a report from IMS Research hailed 2011 as a
“breakthrough year” for the technology, based on a total number of 35m
NFC-enabled phones shipped globally during the year. The news on QR codes was
less positive, as an exclusive survey of 2,000 consumers in the UK and the US
conducted by Mobile Marketing found that most consumers don’t know what a QR
code is. But with the ratio at just 50.4 per cent to 49.6 per cent in favour
of the don’t knows, there is, perhaps, hope for the technology yet.
Certainly, QR codes are starting to pop up all over the place, even if they
don’t always link to a mobile site or content…

And the
deals continued, as Vodafone Global Enterprise, which manages the
communications needs of the network’s largest multinational customers, bought
European IT and communications consultancy, Bluefish Communications for
£3.14m. Mobile marketing, loyalty and technology company MobileWave signed a
deal to acquire Indian mobile tech firm company Ariose Software. And Wireless
m2m (machine-to-machine) technology firm Telit Wireless Solutionsentered into an agreement to purchase GPS
designer and manufacturer, Navman Wireless OEM Solutions, for $3m.

So that was
the year that was, and what a year it was. Even at this late stage, we've had
to revisit the piece to add in a note about Apple lead designer Jony Ive, who
has been knighted in the New Year's honours list. We can't wait to see what
2012 holds, and we will take great pleasure in reporting on as much of it as
we possibly can. To which end, we will be back on the case bright and early
Tuesday morning.

In the
meantime, we wish all our readers, advertisers, sponsors and everyone else we
work with, a very happy and prosperous New Year.